Several cross-cultural studies have found that, on average, European Americans report more positive evaluations about themselves than do East Asians and that on average, East Asians report more self-critical evaluations about themselves than do European Americans. These types of studies average (1) individuals’ self-evaluations across several occasions (e.g., situations or stimuli) and (2) across several individuals on the basis of cultural membership. However, potentially meaningful variability may become lost in these two types of aggregation of data. By using an ‘idiographic, bottom-up approach’, rather than first comparing groups of people of different cultures and then describing what individuals of different cultures are like, I will first investigate individuals’ unique behavior patterns and then identify what is shared between individuals of the same culture group.
To demonstrate shared systematic variability across situations for members of a cultural group, I plan to first identify individuals’ unique psychological response signatures. These signatures can be represented as if…then… relationships (i.e., contingency relationships) between situational cues and self-evaluations that are unique to each individual. Situational cues refer to the important components embedded in a situation that may affect (or cue) particular responses for individuals. For example, if a situation involves shared success, then Mary will evaluate herself positively. If a situation involves succeeding over one’s peers, then Mary will not evaluate herself positively. After several individuals’ unique response signatures are collected, I will see how these signatures vary as a function of cultural membership. This will allow for the identification of a shared psychological response signature, as opposed to a shared average response, for members of the same culture group. For example, rather than demonstrating that European Americans will express greater positive evaluations towards the self than East Asians on average, I hope to demonstrate the conditions under which European Americans and East Asians will express more or less positive evaluations about the self. Further, rather than pre-defining cultural groups on the basis of only one individual differences factor (e.g., nationality or ethnicity), I plan to also measure psychologically meaningful individual differences factors related to culture (e.g., ethnic identification and acculturation) to examine the relationship between these measures and self-evaluation.
While understanding how self-evaluation may vary in relation to cultural membership is important, I also believe that it is important to recognize that the differences between members of the same culture may be meaningful and systematic. In cross-cultural research in psychology, differences between members of the same group are usually considered to be noise. I hope to demonstrate that although a culturally shared response signature may better predict behaviors of a member of that culture than a person who is not, an individual’s personal response signature will better predict that person’s future behavior than the shared signature.
A research paradigm similar to the one described above will also be used for a line of emotion studies. As with the traditional approach to cross-cultural research of self-evaluation, the traditional approach to cross-cultural research of emotion involves the aggregation of emotional responses across situations and across individuals on the basis of cultural membership. My emotion research, will be identifying the if…then… relationships between situational cues and emotional response. Emotion responses will be measured using self-report as well as physiological and behavioral responses. I am particularly interested in the physiological responses because, while there has been very little success in demonstrating physiological response signatures to discreet emotions in general, by taking an idiographic approach, we may find that physiological emotional response signatures may exist within each individual.
I am also interested in individuals’ unique psychological structuring of concepts, such as emotions. In addition to studying the contingency relationship between situational cues and emotional response, I will look at the relationship between different emotion responses. One way of identifying this is by looking at how individuals co-experience emotions. In a sense, this is like a contingency relationship between emotions. For example, if John feels sad, then he never feels happy. In this case, one could say that the psychological distance between these emotions is large for John. But, if when Mary feels sad, then she sometimes co-experiences happiness, one could say that the distance between these emotions is not as large. After individuals’ unique structures of their emotions are identified, how these structures vary in relations to cultural membership will also be examined.
I have been conducting experiments in the past year to better understand women’s responses to potential acquaintance sexual aggression situations. These experiments use a research paradigm similar to the one described above. Women in these experiments listen to several, second person scenarios each involving interaction with a male acquaintance. These stimuli are loosely based on real women’s accounts of the events leading up to (but not including) acquaintance sexual aggression. After each situation, women report what emotions are elicited and how they would behaviorally respond.
In these experiments, we hope to demonstrate individuals’ unique if…then… relationships between situational cues and emotional, as well as behavioral, responses. For example, if a situation involves violation of personal space, then Jane will feel anger, whereas Sarah may feel fear. In addition, we hope to demonstrate individuals’ unique structures of emotion. For example, if Jane feels fear, then she will often simultaneously feel anger, whereas, if Sarah feels fear, then she is unlikely to also feel anger. Lastly, we will look at the relationship between individuals’ response profiles in relation to individual differences factors such as social dating goals and sexual experience.
This research is being conducted in the Shoda Lab in collaboration with Paula Nurius at the UW School of Social Work.
I have been working on this research under the supervision of Yuichi Shoda since
I entered his lab. I do this research in collaboration with--and immensely under
the mentorship of--Vivian Zayas, a postdoctoral fellow and former graduate
student of the Shoda Lab.
First Year Project
This study asks (1) whether emotion information on faces (i.e., facial valence) can be
processed outside of awareness, (2) whether facial information gets processed
differently outside of awareness than non-facial information, and (3) whether
information about the faces of personally significant people gets processed
better than information about the faces of strangers. A sequential priming
method was used to examine changes in behavioral response due to subliminal
displays of smiling and frowning faces of strangers and romantic partners.
Other Studies
Vivian and I conduct others
face primings studies to better understand the conditions in which subliminal
face processing can be demonstrated. Some topics include:
Effects of subliminal prime duration on face priming effects
Effects of supralminal face primes
Role of facial cues in subliminal face processing
Gender facial information processing
Differences between priming effects of faces and of words.
The subliminal mere exposure effect describes the phenomenon under which exposure to novel stimuli outside of awareness (subliminally) increases preference for those stimuli over stimuli not exposed subliminally. Although many subliminal mere exposure experiments have been conducted to date, the literature suggests that the conditions under which this phenomenon can reliably be demonstrated are not fully understood. Further, the criteria for ensuring that ‘subliminally’ displayed stimuli are indeed imperceptible are not standardized across experiments.
In the Greenwald Lab, I am conducting a series of subliminal mere exposure experiments to find the conditions under which the mere exposure effect can reliably be demonstrated when perceptibility of stimuli is stringently controlled for.